Overcoming Stigma and Funding Gaps in Reentry Programs for Formerly Incarcerated Individuals with John David Graham

Hey, wonderful listeners!

This week on the Just Be Cause Podcast, we’re taking you on an inspiring journey with John David Graham, the multifaceted founder of Good Samaritan Home—a transformative housing and mentoring program for individuals reentering society after prison. From wild career detours to compassion-driven innovation, John’s story is a testament to second chances and the power of community-driven solutions.

Tune in as we unpack the stigma surrounding formerly incarcerated individuals, explore the interconnected challenges of mental health, addiction, and homelessness, and dive deep into what it truly means to offer hope and belonging to the most vulnerable. What happens when society greets returning citizens with judgment instead of opportunity? Can genuine partnerships and storytelling shift our perceptions and spark systemic change? How can nonprofits balance focus with flexibility to better serve evolving community needs?

Bring your curiosity (and a box of tissues—you might need it!), and join us for an uplifting, eye-opening conversation about courage, purpose, and the relentless pursuit of doing the right thing… just because.

Important links

John's website

Good Samaritan Home website

John's book: Running As Fast As I Can

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Thanks for listening to Just Be Cause Podcast! I'm Katherine Lacefield the founder and head consultant of Just Be Cause Consulting.

My goal is to partner with YOU nonprofits and philanthropic organizations to help you make a positive impact in your community.

With over 20 years of experience in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, I help organizations optimize their operations with key knowledge in various domains, such as fundraising strategy, grantmaking research, communications, and development.

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Transcript

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I support giving people a second chance just because not only do they benefit, but we benefit, we change, and the whole community is better because of it. Welcome to the Just because podcast. In a space in which the scarcity mindset has been normal for far too long, discover how we're helping nonprofits finally take back their power, find their true purpose, and even use mindfulness to manifest their dream solutions into reality. I'm your host, Katherine Lacefield, a lifetime nonprofit professional. Together we'll master the tools needed to overcome limitations, rise in times of adversity, and understand the interconnectedness of all causes towards a more conscious philanthropy just because it's the right thing to do. Hi everyone and welcome to yet another episode of the Just because podcast. And this week I have something a bit different than usual as we'll be exploring a new area of the nonprofit space with John David Graham, who is the founder of Good Samaritan Home, a housing slash mentoring program that helps men and women restart their lives after prison. Before getting involved in that, he was actually a door to door salesman, a children's home counselor, a substitute school teacher, truck driver, fireman. I mean, I feel like the list just goes on. Minister, and even a journalist. So as you can see, he has a lot of life experience. And sometimes the road home takes many twists and turns. And to develop what John calls a calloused hands and a tender heart, which is the basis of what he used to write his book, his award winning debut novel, Running As Fast as I Can. So, John Graham, I am so pleased to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining me. I am very glad to be here. Catherine, you make my resume actually sound somewhat civilized. Try my best. Let's put it this way, up until I was 53, I couldn't find the road signs of where to go in life. And I made a lot of wrong turns. And when it was all done, it worked out for the best because it led me to Good Samaritan Home. And my detours, as I call them, makes me very sympathetic to others who are struggling. So I just don't want to go through those again. I mean, I feel like going through the journey and going through all of those steps is what builds character, what makes us who we are. Right. I think I don't have as long of a list of jobs. I've always been in the nonprofit sector, but I've tried and dabbled in other things. But that's also what brings us this wealth of skills that we can then use in what I would believe Is like the thing that we were supposed to be doing. It just brings more of a richness, I guess, to your life experience. I came up with a philosophy, probably as a result of the book, but the idea is that we are taught in this technological age, particularly since the 90s, when everything was about making money. The idea was you should go through high school, go through college, get a well paying job, get a big house, have perfect kids, and then you get a place at the country club and everything's successful by the time you're 30. But that's not just a misnomer, it's a lie. Because most of us make a lot of. If we're lucky, we make detours. But some of us come from backgrounds where we don't have the skills, we don't have the tools, we just don't know what the hell to do. And so we make mistakes and we fall down and we end up running a very slow race because we just don't know what to do. I call it a marathon instead of a sprint. But the key that I've learned is that as long as you get up, as long as you keep running, you will reach the end of the race. Now, for me, it was 53 when I actually really started to run. But now I'm 76 and we have. I feel I've reached a point where I dreamed of 50 years ago, but it took all those falls to get here. So I don't regret them. Of course not. And I think that a lot of those mistakes and anyone working in the nonprofit sector, like how many mistakes or projects that didn't work out lead to great things. So let's dive into that a bit with how you founded the Good Samaritan Home. What kind of mistakes did you do along the way? And first of all, what prompted you to really start this project to begin with? Well, I'd always been bent because of my faith. I was bent towards compassion. But knowing how to express that faith is often difficult, particularly in the real world. I tried my bit at being a minister, but minister tends to be rather political. And particularly currently it's become very political. And I just didn't do that well at it. But I was still compassionate. So I had tried three small churches and just succeed. So my wife and I, and we had our family in tow, we said, let's do what our passion is. So we didn't have a job now, obviously, or a place to live. So we said, with my background in construction, because I had been a contractor at one point, let's find an old house, a cheap house, fix it up and turn it into a homeless shelter. And let's do. Let's actually do what we say we believe. And we did that with an 1879 Victorian that hadn't been touched in 50 years. Wow. And, you know, it was one of those things that you look back and say, that was a good decision, but at the time sounded kind of crazy. I said, three months, I'll have it fixed up. And it was 14 years. But it was incredible journey. But what we did was we started with our house as a shelter, and then we applied for some grants, developed our 501C3 IRS designation, all the legal procedures. So we did everything by the book, but there's no income. That's the problem with a nonprofit. So my wife was working at McDonald's, so we scraped by for five years. But in the process, I connected with the Adult Parole Authority, with the Ohio Department of Correction. They had an innovative plan for what we call community reentry. The idea is, when you leave prison, if you just go out into the street without any direction or support, and the parole officer says, get a job, you don't know what to do, so you go where you can to survive. So the idea was the research from all the universities in Ohio was showing that if we have some structured reentry program, then they can get that landing zone. And if you can get a landing zone, it's safe. You can get a job. If you get a job, you pay your child support, you pay your taxes, you buy goods in the community and you stay out of jail. And they ask us, with our shelter now that we had, if we would be willing to do that. And so we partnered with the state as a nonprofit to offer structured shelter for persons referred to us coming from prison, low risk persons who were here anyway. But they just needed a safe place. And by doing that, we're able to buy another house and fix it up, because we got a contract now for four beds, and that's a per diem contract. And the thing about prison is it costs $109 a day to house somebody, but to put them in the community, they pay us a fraction of that. So we have an income, but the state now doesn't have to pay all of that cost. And then these people are working, so everybody wins. So we just dive into that funding question a bit, because I think a lot of people listening, a lot of nonprofits tend to focus on foundation grants or on, you know, state grants, as well as individual donations. But in your case, would you like. Are you 100% funded from these state contracts now? Well, originally we were getting grants, but during George Bush's faith based initiative, there was a lot of emphasis on that, and 20 other nonprofits in the Dayton region started along with us. The danger with faith based nonprofits is you think it's easy. You go out and get grants and you can live large and you can walk around in their white shirt and tie and. And look important. But the truth is, it's a lot of groundwork. It's just like building houses. You got to get dirty. And so I did all the remodeling. I did all the hands on work. I was a staff of one with my wife. And we had to be daily involved with our residents, had to be hands on, and we were getting a few donations. But to be quite honest, dealing with men and women coming from prison is not popular. Yeah, I can give you the data, and I can show that the Republicans would be glad with the savings, and the Democrats are glad with the moral aspect of it. But everybody says, not in my backyard. That's definitely an issue. Oh, it was a big issue, because the fear you're seeing in the community now with immigrants was exactly what we went through in 2002, except it was those people coming from prison. And the underpinning is always race, no matter what they say, because those people are always somebody who doesn't look like me. And we had blowback from the community. We had petitions, we had threats. I had ordinances passed. I had police protection at one point. Now, here's the key. If you believe in what you're doing, then it gives you this command of the higher ground. And I had studied a great deal under Dr. King and the civil rights movement in the 60s. And what I learned was that it's how you respond. And so we chose not to respond to the fear by inciting more fear. So I became what I call a backstop. Just absorb that. Let them venture, and you be the adult in the room. And also we had an attorney, and that helped. I let him be the dog in the yard, but it took seven years. But we never, never backed down. And we kept doing our job quietly. And I call it snowblower. We took our snowblower in winter and cleaned the entire block every time it snowed without saying a word. We were saying, we are good neighbors. Mm. And I joke about it, but it's true. After seven years, those same people who waved at us with one finger now used all their fingers. And I Think this is such a great lesson for anyone listening, especially in some of what I would deem invisible causes or the causes that are less talked about. Yeah. If you're a nonprofit that defends sick children, you have like what I would call in French la creme de la creme, like the cause that everyone can get on board with. But that doesn't mean that all of these other causes are not valuable and that don't have value as a community. I remember very clearly learning about what makes us human is our ability to defend those that are most vulnerable in our communities. Bingo. And these, these individuals that for whatever reason go to jail and sometimes it's as ridiculous as they didn't pay tickets. Like that doesn't make them criminals in the sense of. That they're not bad people. There are some circumstances that can make a lot of these individuals end up in these situation that we have to be more understanding. But there's such a, a judgment on a lot of the prison population. And the. For me the problem is like, so then where are they supposed to go if we don't welcome them back in their community, into the community, we don't try to get them to become involved, have a sense of purpose. What do we think the outcome is going to be? They're going to just go back into whatever made it. So then they go into jail. And that is what the whole difference is around rehabilitation and, and how to re integrate these people into our communities. And so I love your approach of absorbing that and knowing that no, this is the right thing to do. And I'm not going to back down. Because if you back down, that's almost like you're admitting that you're not. Right. That's right. And be quite candid. I had no options. I had failed so many places that I was near homeless myself if I was not careful. So I was without a choice. So. And that actually made it easier. It's like the Spanish explorers did in the 1500s when they traveled from Europe to the South America. They burned the boats when they landed so that the men could never return or be tempted to return. They had to develop a colony. We burned the bridges, which is kind. Of scary, but sometimes that's the way that we can actually get involved into a new project and make sure that we see it through. And in your case, that was a, a conscious decision, not forced upon you by colonizers like the Spanish, hopefully. But no, I think that, that I agree that sometimes you need to have all of your, all of your eggs in that basket. So you don't have that fear of like, no, no, I'm going to stay safe. Because that tends to not push for innovation a lot of these situations. Let's go back to that funding model around what are these advantages for the state and the community of working with this type of model regarding rehabilitation? So we've talked about from a financial perspective that as a state, if we invest in these community driven initiatives, that it's actually going to lower the cost per day of keeping these inmates either in jail versus in the community. So that's a financial aspect. Would you say that there's any other social components or social aspects that makes this type of model of the state working with a community organization more Advantageous? Back in 1958, there was a rural pastor went to New York to work in, in what they called Hell's Kitchen with heroin addicts. And he devoted his life to helping these struggling addicts in the ghetto. And he would go to the suburbs of New York and tell people that drugs will be an issue in your communities too. And they all said, no way, it will never happen to us. 1958. But today it's not just in the suburbs, it's with the advent of oxies. And that led to heroin, which replaced the oxies. And then meth came in. And now we're back and forth with meth and heroin. And now in rural communities, farm communities, where they used to sneak behind the barn with a beer, they're now sneaking behind the barn and they're doing a hotshot. And I've never, I never thought I'd say this, but I'm using the term heroin in conversation in communities that never even heard the term before. And these are not just those people. It's their children, it's their brothers and sisters, it's their parents, it's professionals. About 80% of the people we deal with have either mental health or addiction issues. And these are not bad people, but they made bad choices when they're under the influence and they're accountable for that. And it takes about seven times in rehab to overcome an addiction on average. It's not a small thing. And you're not going to overcome it if you're homeless? No, there's, there's the status right there. And if you want to solve these issues, and this is where. So my podcast tends to talk a lot about this interconnection. So there's the issue of mental health, which is out of most people's control. I have bipolar in my family. These situations and these These illnesses are not something that people can control and sometimes the medication is not necessarily the best for them, so they tend to want to avoid it. And so that creates all these situations and these, these cycles so that they end up self medicating. And then we have these vicious cycles that are, that doesn't make these people bad people, but exactly like you say, in certain states they don't make the best decisions. But let's be honest, haven't we all been there to a certain degree of making bad decisions in certain emotional states and certain physical states if we're not feeling well? So it's hard to, for me, when people have this huge judgment of people that are dealing with mental health, are dealing with addiction and not having that compassionate ear to listen to, because from what I understand, the only thing that actually keeps people out of jail, that keeps people away from, from drugs, is a good sense of community. And if we lose that, then what is left? What I've found again and again and again is that the people we deal with come from probably some sort of what I call a limp, a family structure that was the father was not there, the mother was not there, or she was addicted, the grandmother raised them or foster care raised them, or they ran on the streets. Society changed from 1950 with Leave it to Beaver and in the 60s we wanted all these freedoms. And the end result with freedoms was there was the third generation that didn't have the structure that I grew up with, at least as a community. When I was growing up. You went out to play until the streetlights came on and your parents never worried about you. But today, what are you looking at on your phone? There's so many issues that can draw somebody. And with the advent of drugs coming in, who ever heard of DARE in the elementary schools? It's unfathomable, the change in the society. So we have to adapt. I believe rather than curse the darkness, we have to find a way to shine the light. And that's what DARE tried to do. And that's basically what we're trying to do. We're trying to offer some ray of light in a dark situation where people are looking for hope. And what we found is if we can give a safe place temporarily at no charge so you can get a job. But what we do more than anything else is we treat you with respect. And that means often offering you a structured environment where you're responsible for, for your bed, your room, your kitchen. We don't clean and cook for you. You are responsible to act like an adult. And that's what I call a pronoun shift, because I got me to prison. But if I do this for we, my roommate and I, I can stay out of prison because that basically what got us to prison was selfish behavior of some sort of. And so I put a great deal of emphasis on housekeeping because your bed tells me where your head is. And that sounds cliche, but it's actually quite true. I can almost tell when somebody's relapsing by looking at their room. And I think we had talked about it on our last conversation. But your physical environment greatly influences how you can feel inside and vice versa. I know that when I'm not in a good emotional state, first thing to go is cleaning up. It's picking up stuff. I don't have the energy to do it. And I know that I've seen that in many places when you. When you have a messy environment, it also can influence how you feel. I just feel overwhelmed. I don't feel like I can't be as productive. So the two. When we take care of both, of making sure that we're in the right mental state, but also making sure our external environments reflect that we're just putting so much more chances on our side of being able to move forward and keep advancing in whatever it is we're trying to achieve. The best example I can give is Jimmy. He had been in prison for a five year bit, but he was schizophrenic. And so he struggled all of his life, came from a horrid background, but he did do two years in the Navy when he was younger, so he had the VA hospital to help him. But the trouble is with mental illness, often if you choose not to go to the hospital, choose not to take your meds, then you're on the street. And he, on any given day, thought he was James Bond. And they found him one Winter, he was 67 years old in his truck that had broken down near death because of the temperature. And they took him to the VA hospital. The hospital called us and said, can you help? Can you house him? They guaranteed his medication. And Jimmy stayed with us off the street now for a week, two weeks, a month, a year, 14 years, he stayed with us. And when he died at 81, he said this was the only home he ever had. That, to me, is how we can address it. One man, one woman at a time. And that's the power of storytelling. And as a nonprofit, I think these are the stories for anyone listening. I don't know about you, but like that just, that just hit hard. And I think for anyone listening from a purely fundraising marketing perspective and from sharing your story, these are the kinds of stories that people will be able to attach to because everyone or almost anyone knows someone in their family that is suffering from mental health. And I can suddenly imagine my uncle or my cousin on the streets dealing with this situation and wishing that there was something out there that they can feel like they have a home, because not everyone can offered that support. I have a cousin who ended up on the streets, major drug addiction issues. And her family just didn't have the tools or resources of don't. They didn't know how to deal with it. So this is why when we talk about mental health, we talk about the unhoused. When we talk about people coming out of jail, it's all connected. And when people, we want to have people, we don't want to see people on the streets. But then we also don't want them in our backyard as we don't want to have these centers in our own backyard. It causes these conflicts. Now, as we talked about before, about how you dealt with these issues, was there anything else? So you, obviously, you were showing yourself as we are good neighbors and so you were using the snowblower as a way of like, you know what? I'm just going to push back with positivity instead of pushing back with anger. Is there anything else, let's say, for any other nonprofit out there, any other strategies that you used to keep that strategy straight face, if we could say, and stay positive in the face of all this negativity and anything that you would recommend for organizations either in similar situations or exactly the same one, so how they can move forward with a more positive outlook on these conflicts. During the conflict, I would present to the council all the reams of data that the research had shown. And I come in with piles of it. And you could see people glaze over because they just don't. They don't care about data. No. I had an attorney, bright man who eventually became a judge. He was one of our key critics. And I explained to him over lunch the data. And he said, I don't care, I just don't want them here. Because what he was saying was, politics won't let me. And I even had another very good judge say that it would make it difficult to be reelected. Ultimately, though, ultimately he came around as a supporter because he knew in the long run that it was a positive thing for the community. But it took a long time. So what I did in the meantime was I always put out newsletters with stories and pictures. That was my journalism background. And I was writing a newspaper column for a local chain of newspapers and I would just tell fun stories about people and always put what I call the outcast stories in a positive light. It was called Slice of Life and it was funny. In fact, I just reran one of the stories recently about the girl Scott Cookies. And I met the devil and she's four foot tall, nine years old and wears a Brownie uniform. And I told the story about being tempted by the cookies and I still get feedback from that because we presented ourselves in a positive, non threatening way. Instead of always preaching, we just tried to have some fun in the community too. And I think that is such an important lesson for anyone. And whatever the cause may be of using humor, using that lightheartedness, there's really this move away from those sad stories. No one wants to hear sad stories anymore. We want to hear the happy outcomes. The transformations, like the story of Jimmy is heartbreaking but also inspirational. Doesn't mean that you have to gloss over the difficult parts. It just means that we need to focus on the outcomes, the positive outcomes that will benefit the individuals and put them in a more empowering light where we were able to get this person off of the streets, dealing with themselves in a home and making them feel welcome. For me, that is a positive income, positive outcome story and all of this power of storytelling. I'll repeat it once again for anyone listening. Sharing data doesn't motivate most people. It's sharing these real stories of these real people that will have be positively impact that is much more likely to switch people's mindsets than just showing statistics. It doesn't work. I like to compare it to if we were going on a cruise and these cruise ships are quite large and you travel the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. And so what if they gave you a documentary to watch called Lifeboat Safety? And so you would look at that Lifeboat Safety and say yeah, yeah, yeah. And you'd be probably scanning your phone instead. But what if they showed you Titanic? Titanic, that's exactly right. They showed you Titanic. And you watch Jack and Rose. And if they had had lifeboats, they would have survived. And so what I learned was that nobody cares about reentry, Nobody cares about recovery or rehabilitation. So I wrote a story that I been playing with in my head for years of Daniel Robinson and his struggle coming from abuse and rejection and wandering in like a Forrest Gump journey through the 60s and 70s. And that story of Daniel Robinson's struggle to find love and acceptance, to find forgiveness, became a model for Good Samaritan Home. And that book has sold to date, 12,000 copies, which is unheard of for an independent publisher. And it's garnered 30 awards. Because people, particularly today in our fear ridden, angst filled culture, we're looking for hope. And the book running as fast as I Can is, by and large, it's a story of hope if you keep running. And I have been just amazed. These podcasts have all they were about the book, but originally, but now they're all about hope and second chances. And I've garnered, I've done 61 of these in the past several months. People are hungry to hear some good news. Well, if we look at the media like I don't even, I try to not listen to the media anymore because it's just so full of negativity all the time and it's just so heavy. It's so heavy. And I just read this amazing book that I recommend for anyone who needs that glimp of hope as well called Humankind. And it's a hopeful history of humanity and it really showcases how there are these stories of people like you who have dedicated the last, what, 30 some years to these amazing projects that are helping people. And that is completely selfless. It's not like you're benefiting financially from this very much. You're just doing this. We pay the bills, we pay the. Bills, we pay the bills. But you're not getting a cruise with lifeboats in it, like you're saying. But just to say, like there are people out there that are doing, that are fighting the good fight, as I like to say. And it's just we need more of those stories of hope. So don't hesitate to share them. Before, before we dive into more of the book, I just had one question more around the services that you offer, because I remember talking about it, I thought this was very important. What is your take on nonprofits being hyper focused on one particular service versus offering a very wide range of resources and services? Because this I think is very important, both on how you can get different types of funding and also just on how you can actually achieve your mission. So I'd love to hear what you think about that. I have to speak just specifically about our situation. But what I ask because there's a strong tendency, particularly with any faith based group, to say, I want to do this. This is my passion. I'm going to do this in my community. But we asked the question in reverse what is the need in the community and how can we help meet that need? And the need, we learned, was housing for homeless persons. And then the parole authority came to us and said the real need is reentry housing. So we adapted to that and we stayed specifically on that reentry housing. So we don't take people off the street anymore because it's mixing our message. We only take them through the adult parole authority, number one. It's a safety factor because they screen and control and we are accountable to their standards and it keeps us much, much safer. But also what happened as we were going along, we found that our program is for upwards of nine months to a year. But after that, let's suppose you get a job and nobody will rent to you, or you're on Social Security and you only make$750 a month. How can you rent? How can you survive? You can't survive. Yeah. It's not meant. You can't even live on that. And you may well be disabled or you're 75 years old and you're not going to be working at McDonald's. So what we said was we need to have long term housing. And that's where Jimmy came in. We developed our own program that, where they can stay for just a minimal fee. You had to have an income of some sort and you could stay indefinitely, but you're still under our, our rule structure and our accountability structure. So it gave us what he called mentoring through housing. And Jimmy was a good example. And now we've gone from just Jimmy in one apartment to now I think we have 35 men in. I think it's six or seven different apartments, duplexes or fourplexes. And they've been with us for years. And most of them are either on disability or they are not mentally stable enough to be on their own. And they can't live without some degree of structure. And so that was something we developed based on the need that we saw. So to answer your question, I would say what is the need in the community and how do you adapt to meet that need and focus on that? But then as the need changes, I would say we have to be flexible. But don't spread yourself so thin that you become a universalist and not very good at it. Yeah. And I think I've seen so many organizations just try to have so many different services and it just is impossible to maintain. Like you said, it dilutes the message and it makes it very hard to identify who is your target audience of who's going to fund you of also, who are you going to be attracting as beneficiaries? And also it makes it very difficult to just generally run your organization when you're running around with 300 different programs. There are some organizations that have gotten to the point where they have such a big structure where they can manage different, all these different departments. But I would say especially for the smaller and even medium sized organizations, niching down to be more specific is also, in my opinion, the best way to actually solve your mission. If you're just doing a little bit of everything, I feel like it's going to be very difficult and probably a very far horizon before you can actually have concrete impact. And isn't that the goal is to show impact as soon as possible so that you can then move on, get even more attraction towards your organization because you're actually having the impact on what you said you were doing. We don't do counseling. We don't do job counseling. We don't do job training. The county reentry office does job training. The wellness center does the mental health and the rehabilitation counseling. Job and family does the job. Food stamp issues. None of them provide housing. So we become their housing arm. They become our social service partner. So everybody does their own thing. Well, and this is for anyone listening, we've done episodes on the importance of partnerships and this is where I feel, hearing you. We're talking about the state needs a type of resource like yours. Instead of them creating their own, why don't they just use the resources that exist in the community? So that's a partnership with the state. But then we have all of these other social entities or even maybe other nonprofits that already offer services that can be beneficial to your organization. Instead of trying to do better for them them or doing it yourself, why not just partner with an existing entity and share an exchange, which just makes this network of support so much larger. And we can trust other people to offer better services because that's their expertise. So for anyone listening, if you haven't explored partnerships yet, please reach out to organizations that offer complementary services and see how you can exchange services to make it more just generally more smart as an organization. Let me put it in very simple terms. I'm a husband to one wife and I do a good job with one wife. I don't think I could be a polygamist and have five wives. You need a lot more money, that's for sure. I need a better memory on birthdays. Oh my. If it wasn't for Google Calendar. I don't know how I would remember anything anymore. But honestly, John, I think that there's so many lessons here about the importance of looking into different partnerships. We've talked about how to face negativity when you're dealing with a cause that is not so well accepted in your community, and how to do it with grace. And also on the power of storytelling to really showcase your mission and not depend too much on data, even if the data is the proof. If we could say people are motivated by that emotional aspect of sharing stories. So to end with about your book, what where can people find it? How can people order this book and support this organization? Well, obviously, I mean, more listen to these inspiring stories. The story was I started writing when I was 65 years old and I wrote in three years the first draft. And I thought this is great. But what I wrote was a very flat, black and white bland story. So I was rejected when I tried to publish, and rejected and rejected because the story itself I thought was enough. But I realized that you can't just run on one horse. You have to actually do excellence. So I edited and rewrote and edited and then I hired an editor. And for seven years we did 24 different drafts. I was rejected 200 times until it was finally picked up by an independent, what I call an outcast publisher called Don Quixote Press. And we ended up with what I feel to be a very intensely emotional story akin to Forrest Gump, where you can identify with Daniel, you feel Daniel. And I've had readers write to me and say I couldn't stop reading. I couldn't put it down. I found myself crying. And see what they're doing is saying I feel the story. And so I had to learn how to truly edit. And that's a hard job. It's so difficult. As someone who's I've done a lot of editing when I was of articles and just that is difficult. But I think that these this is another example of how words can be very powerful when used in the right way, if we could say, or when properly edited. So this book is available, of course, all the links to the Good Samaritan Home, as well as running as fast as I can, will be linked in the show notes below. So if you're looking for an inspiring story to really show you a different side and give you some hope in this world, I would recommend checking it out and ordering it today. It's available in Audible, hardback, paperback, in ebook, and also Kindle Unlimited right now. And even without, you can download a sample page, three chapters free if you want, just to get the feel of it. But I guarantee you it's an easy read. And if you're not crying at the end, there's something wrong somewhere. So go check. Thank you so much. John. If there's. If anyone wants to reach out to you about the work that you're doing, what is the best way for them to connect with you? My website, john davidgraham.com I get emails periodically and I'm not opposed to that. And just let me know. And I'm learning how to speak Facebook and TikTok and Instagram and I'm even on substack where I can actually write things of some substance. And this storytelling, it's the most exciting part of the nonprofit. It really is. And I feel like it has been a bit neglected where we were focusing a lot on statistics and scary things. And I think that now we're moving more towards these inspirational stories to really push people to take action. So John, thank you so much for taking the time to join me on the call today. I think we could take a lot of lessons from this call. Thank you again. And of course for anyone listening, if you want to connect with John, all of the information that we talked about will be in the show notes below. So thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you. Kathryn. Thanks for tuning in to the Just because podcast. Are you enjoying the content we're creating? We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Thanks for leaving us your wonderful review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and hitting that subscribe button to have access to new episodes as soon as they drop. All of our affiliate partners are hand selected to offer you only tried, tested and true tools to give your organization the absolute best. 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